A blog about politics, education, Ireland, culture and travel. I am Conor Ryan, Dublin-born former adviser to Tony Blair and David Blunkett on education. Views expressed on this blog are written in a personal capacity.

Tuesday, 12 May 2015

I've blogged at the Sutton Trust on the educational backgrounds of the new MPs and Cabinet.

The election result on May 7 may have surprised pundits
expecting a hung parliament. But it was equally interesting in what it says
about Britain today, and who now gets to become an MP. Across the political
spectrum, the diversity that really started in the late 90s has now become
embedded in both main parties, and not just in an improved gender and ethnic
balance, but also in a more socially representative group of MPs.

Over several elections, the Sutton Trust has been tracking
the educational backgrounds of MPs and cabinet ministers, and there are some
interesting trends visible in our Parliamentary Privilege research
brief this week. For a start, newly-elected MPs are much more likely to have
been to comprehensive schools in 2015 than those who were re-elected from the
2010 intake. And our analysis of the new Cabinet –widely quoted in the press
this week – showed a doubling in the proportion of ministers attending Cabinet
who had been to non-selective state schools.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that a private education is not
still an advantage for Parliament or the Cabinet, just as it is at the top of
professions from the law to the City. Half of David Cameron’s Cabinet was
privately educated, seven times the proportion of the population who attend
independent schools, and 32% of MPs were too, over four times the national
average.

Moreover, while Conservative MPs are a bit less likely to
have been privately educated – at 48% probably the first time their proportion
has dipped below half – a number of Labour’s new intake had an independent
education, pushing their proportion up slightly to 17%.

When people talk about parliamentary privilege in education,
they often couple an Oxbridge education with having been to public school.
However, the two groups are not synonymous and we would expect MPs to be better
educated than the population at large. Still, it is still interesting that more
than a quarter of MPs went to Oxford or Cambridge and a further 28% attended
another Russell Group university. Half the Cabinet also has an Oxbridge
education. Interestingly, among the new SNP group of 56 MPs – at least the 40
whose educational backgrounds were publicly available – few had a private
education and Glasgow was perhaps unsurprisingly their main political training
ground.

So what are we to make of all this? Of course, we should
welcome evidence of improved mobility for state educated parliamentarians, and
the Cabinet and Commons should be the richer for this wider experience, just as
it has been improved by having a growing number of women MPs and those from BME
communities. But just as the 29%
of female MPs and 6% of BME MPs in the new Commons are not yet
representative of the community as a whole, neither should we rest on our
laurels when even in this new intake the newly elected MPs are four times more
likely to be privately educated than average.

Some will say that this is all about class envy publicising
this information, and some candidates refuse to make public their educational
backgrounds perhaps for that reason. That isn’t what it is about at all. Rather
it is to recognise that access to our best schools – and that includes our best
comprehensives and grammar schools – is too often related to ability to pay,
including the means to buy a house in a popular catchment area. So we need this
more representative group of MPs to address these issues, supporting fairer
admissions to comprehensives and needs blind access to independent day schools.
The issue is one of fair access.

Equally, we should be less concerned that Oxbridge and the
Russell Group has such a grip on political life than we should be that access
to those leading universities is still so heavily skewed towards the richest
communities. A child from the top fifth of neighbourhoods is still more than six
times more likely to go to a leading university than one from the bottom
fifth, and when it comes to the top 13 (including Oxbridge) that gap widens to nine-fold.
There are too many bright youngsters from less advantaged areas who are not
getting as far as applying to these universities, let alone being admitted to
them.

So that’s the challenge for our ‘comprehensive’ Commons and
Cabinet – will they do more to promote fair access to our best schools and
universities, so they can be trailblazers for many more young people from
modest backgrounds to reach the centres of political power in Britain today?

Publications

Excellence in Education (2005)

About Me

Dublin-born in 1963, since September 2012 I have been Director of Research and Communications for the Sutton Trust. I was previously senior adviser to David Blunkett from 1993-2001 and Tony Blair's senior education adviser from 2005-7. I have also been an independent writer and consultant. I am the author (with Cyril Taylor) of Excellence in Education (David Fulton, 2004)and Freedom from Failure (CPS, 2002); and editor of Bac or Basics (SMF, 2004) and Staying the Course (SMF, 2008), co-editor with Julian Astle of a book on Academies (Centreforum, 2008) and author of Lessons for Life (HTI, 2011). I have also written many articles for the Guardian, Independent, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Times, Sunday Times, TES, Irish Times, Public Finance, New Statesman and Tribune, among other publications, and contributed to many national and local radio and TV news programmes in the UK and Ireland. I am a director at a multi-academy trust and a trustee of the National Foundation for Educational Research.
All views expressed on this blog are my own and appear in a personal capacity.